The attraction for the "mother mountain
" is visceral and religious ... but at the same time the approach is playful and effervescent. Majella, out of the smallish, is mostly wild and deserted. It is not very popular, and this gives it a connotation perhaps even more striking.
strange today, to find two ski touring in preparation for entrance to the rava. From their "
buonciorno! " s'evince that it is not just in Abruzzo. In addition to the duties and greetings to the transceiver beeps, nothing hurts the religious silence of the woods naked in the static facets gives sometimes ghostly.
You find yourself so the channel, as if we were always friends, two snowboarders and two skiers intent on gaining meters of altitude. One of them is a train, in short gains the dominant position. It is not a race, but some considerations are unavoidable.
you look in his eyes, pointing to a greeting, not speaking. A little 'because it is between strangers, a bit' to save breath for stop avoiding the fine tuning was born on the combination of breathing and heartbeat.
Less than an hour and are completely isolated from one another, each carry only himself and his thoughts. Evidently is what you look for in certain places. A regular raise my head and check on my position in relation to others, even the "stranger" looks at me from above. I know that measures the distance, he does at every cross, like I do, yet it is not a competition. I realize that is an ability to consider their response using a 'foreign'. It's not in my will overcome the other but the other takes on the considerable value of the spring driving.
It's a good game, all control everything. The first surge of energy looking at the tiny black silhouette of the last snow, the second finds unexpected reserves of strength in order to follow the first, and so on. Today the game, you want for a channel that "forces" in the direction, everything is pretty well balanced and seem to hold a couple of hours, until the nasty fog will not intervene to close down the dance.
Everything changes. Now no one sees anyone. But all agree to back down. The chirp of the ski edges slightly above speak volumes about the condition of the coat. Here too, we look ... from a distance, as soon as the fog can see the colors of the jackets. Their procedure is slow and careful, so do we, helping with the ax. We realize that we share this too: a condition so hard that usually makes a descent demanding an extreme downhill. A gradient of 35 ° made of marble and filled with ice very hard lumps. Bend is nearly impossible without injuring down into a dangerous spin. "Foreigners" have decided to cross the worst stretch on foot, skis. We do it to "
dead leaf, face upstream, thus remaining more ready to put the pick on the ice when necessary.
little further down, the tension s'allenta and you find yourself at a safe distance to all corners brush the snow still hard but that is beginning to affect more generously.
Where the stones show eloquently the end of the descent, we finally find together. Smiles of approval and the sharing of emotions seasoned close encounter with the Austrians, we communicate in English, so in a broken English (at least mine) to border on the ridiculous. But we mean ...
We finish it all around a table, the only busy in the restaurant, eating spaghetti and drinking beer. We find that the two, after turning the Austrian Alps
those
Swiss, French
... and some 'of those Italian
brooded earnestly desire to know the Apennines of central Italy (so unjustly mistreated by the locals - note) and they were doing it with great enthusiasm. Although they also wandered on
McKinley (Alaska - 6194 m.) and an eight thousand in
Himalayas.
And I dreamed that, up ... a star after them! :)))
